Chapter - Economy

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Ten New Studies of the “Local Economic Premium”
Civic Economics analyzed public reports from Darden, McDonald’s, and PF Chang’s to project local procurement percentages for chain restaurants.

These eateries were estimated to recirculate an average of 30.4% of revenue within the local market. The multiplier is higher with restaurants than retailers largely because local labor costs comprise a higher portion of overall operating expenses. Also, local restaurateurs often can source significant portions of their fare locally — something not possible for many retailers. Framing the findings.
The Multiplier Effect of Local Independent Businesses. This resource also is offered in Spanish.

Leer en español. For holiday-themed versions of the multiplier effect graphs below, see this menu.
Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Last update: Jan. 8, 2016 In recent decades, policy across the country has privileged the biggest corporations.

Yet a growing body of research is proving something that many citizens already know: small-scale, locally owned businesses create communities that are more prosperous, entrepreneurial, connected, and generally better off across a wide range of metrics.
Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Le revenu universel, généalogie d’une utopie. You’re witnessing the death of neoliberalism – from within. What does it look like when an ideology dies?

As with most things, fiction can be the best guide. In Red Plenty, his magnificent novel-cum-history of the Soviet Union, Francis Spufford charts how the communist dream of building a better, fairer society fell apart. Even while they censored their citizens’ very thoughts, the communists dreamed big. Spufford’s hero is Leonid Kantorovich, the only Soviet ever to win a Nobel prize for economics. Rattling along on the Moscow metro, he fantasises about what plenty will bring to his impoverished fellow commuters: “The women’s clothes all turning to quilted silk, the military uniforms melting into tailored grey and silver: and faces, faces the length of the car, relaxing, losing the worry lines and the hungry looks and all the assorted toothmarks of necessity.”

It was an address for the Future of Work Conference, in Zurich, Switzerland, 5th May 2016, at the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. In this presentation Yanis Varoufakis, totally reframes the concept of how wealth is created in nations and the societies they structure. He argues for a new view of minimum basic income, not as a safety net to save people who may fall, but a foundation on which people can stand to rise up as productive citizens. His presentation includes the new technological context that for the first time in history, smart machines will eliminate far more jobs than they create. What is really significant about this presentation is the creation of an alternative view of wealth creation which he brings about through reframing the concept of how most people think about wealth. A good example of this is the Human Genome Project.
Will the Universal Basic Income make us lonely?

The Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the Big Progressive Idea on the tip of lots of people’s tongues at the moment.

It’s hardly a new concept. There are fragmentary references to basic incomes from the sixteenth century (in the work of Thomas More), and probably earlier. Since then, many philosophers, campaigners, and activists have taken up the cause – including recently, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. What’s changed is that governments, politicians, and the private sector are more willing than ever before to take the idea seriously. The Finnish government has expressed an intention to run a pilot Universal Basic Income scheme. Private backers of the idea have shown a commitment to funding further research, too.

The New Digital Economy: Shared, Collaborative and On Demand. The sharing economy and on-demand services are weaving their way into the lives of (some) Americans, raising difficult issues around jobs, regulation and the potential emergence of a new digital divide A number of new commercial online services have emerged in recent years, each promising to reshape some aspect of the way Americans go about their lives.

Some of these services offer on-demand access to goods or services with the click of a mouse or swipe of a smartphone app. Others promote the commercialized sharing of products or expertise, while still others seek to connect communities of interest and solve problems using open, collaborative platforms. These services have sparked a wide-ranging cultural and political debate on issues such as how they should be regulated, their impact on the changing nature of jobs and their overall influence on users’ day-to-day lives.

Le Salaire à Vie (Bernard Friot)
Exploring the Next-Step Economy (Christian Arnsperger's blog): What transition? Part 4: Renewing the framework (Installment #4: Introducing an Economic Transition Income)
This post is based in large part on joint work I did with Warren A. Johnson at the end of 2010. Warren is an eminent geographer, now professor emeritus from San Diego State University, who has worked for four decades on natural resources and on pathways out of the current economic and social model.